Excellent choice! Particularaly since we were treated to a Linder short (Max Wants a Divorce) and feature Seven Years Bad Luck at the San Francisco Silent Film Fest. I've seen bits of Linder, but, this was my first exposure of him in anything but snippets. I loved him!

Well, I had the third in this series of three silent comedy tributes set to go the same month as the Mack Sennett set was coming out... and now that's been pushed back to August 12. But never mind, it's an image well-suited to the month of July nevertheless. Billy Bevan, who will be one of the main focuses of the set, poses here with some Mack Sennett Bathing Beauties (no I can't name them all, though I suppose it's not impossible that Phyllis Haver just became the first person to make the masthead twice; anyone want to give it a go?) Anyway, lots of discussion of the set here, and no doubt more when it comes out; while my interview with Paul E. Gierucki about it is here.

“Sentimentality is when it doesn't come off—when it does, you get a true expression of life's sorrows.” —Alain-Fournier

Sennett has been on the masthead, I've never run Normand but considered her for this month (but didn't find a pic that really sang for me), I have a Pickford pic waiting for some appropriate occasion, and there's always...

“Sentimentality is when it doesn't come off—when it does, you get a true expression of life's sorrows.” —Alain-Fournier

Mike Gebert wrote:Sennett has been on the masthead, I've never run Normand but considered her for this month (but didn't find a pic that really sang for me), I have a Pickford pic waiting for some appropriate occasion, and there's always...

Not sure about Jim, but I LURV that one. Could you maybe change "Nitrateville" to "KHAAAAAAAAAANNNNN!!?"

There's a great Pakistani restaurant here called Khan BBQ, and some prankster made them a sign for the side window that says "Khan BBQ" in the exact Star Trek mid-80s typeface. I don't think they get the joke...

“Sentimentality is when it doesn't come off—when it does, you get a true expression of life's sorrows.” —Alain-Fournier

Mike Gebert wrote:There's a great Pakistani restaurant here called Khan BBQ, and some prankster made them a sign for the side window that says "Khan BBQ" in the exact Star Trek mid-80s typeface. I don't think they get the joke...

Mike Gebert wrote:Sennett has been on the masthead, I've never run Normand but considered her for this month (but didn't find a pic that really sang for me), I have a Pickford pic waiting for some appropriate occasion, and there's always...

My point is that July 1st is Canada Day, the founding day of our country, equal to July 4th for the USA. Surely for that one day, if not the whole month, you could put a Canadian up there on the masthead.

As I've written in my review of Brent Walker's Sennett book (see the Literary Review of Canada archives), the Hollywood comedy is a Canadian invention. Biograph's pioneering comedy company was nearly all Canadian. It included Sennett, who went on to more or less create film comedy as we still know it (the ten-minute sketch comedy, the 24-minute sitcom, the feature-length all-star-cast epic movie comedy, and everything in between). And it was all done in the silent era.

World War I officially began on July 28, 1914 when Austro-Hungary fired on Serbia, a month to the day after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, but its start would be forever known as, as one famous book title put it, the guns of August. Besides being the first world war— at least in the sense of stretching from the Atlantic to the Dardanelles and Russia, and in its end, deciding the fate of places from Iraq to Indochina— it would be the first movie war, the first whose experience would be recorded in films representing every imaginable viewpoint and bringing the experience of its fronts to people in movie theaters worldwide. Winsor McCay to Charlie Chaplin and his brother Syd, Griffith to Gance to Ingram, Vidor to Hawks to Ford, Wellman to Walsh to Whale, Pabst to Bernard to Renoir, Kubrick and Attenborough and Weir and Spielberg even after another, vaster war.

To represent the war I chose the movie that, if any can be called the defining statement on the war, would be the one: Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front, winner of the third Best Picture Oscar in 1930, starring Lew Ayres and the indelible ex-Cornell math instructor with a bruiser's mug Louis Wolheim. The adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's pacifist novel was made by Carl Laemmle at a moment when a German-born producer who'd made good in Hollywood could believe that he might have the power, through a movie, to convince his native land never to go to war again. It would not be so, but despite the dust that has settled on some of the dialogue scenes, the ferocious visual imagination of Milestone's depiction of trench warfare and the overwhelming sadness of its tale of youthful disillusionment makes it, to my mind, the first great sound film (Pabst's Westfront 1918 would be one of the next) and a classic for as long as we remember the war.

“Sentimentality is when it doesn't come off—when it does, you get a true expression of life's sorrows.” —Alain-Fournier

First thought: how did Jack Lemmon get into a movie with Louis Wollheim?

For me, All Quiet on the Western Front is not remarkable as the first great sound film, but as the first great noisy film. Those battle sequences with a range of sounds of explosions and whistling are like nothing else I've ever heard in any war movie and far more visceral for that. Even on a tv, it makes me flinch. How telling that it featured the last screen role of Raymond Griffith, as Gerard Duvall, the French soldier whom Ayres bayonets and shares a foxhole with, slowly dying!

Bob

The matter is complicated, and I shall proceed to complicate it still more.

Excellent choice, Mike. The recent restoration of ALL QUIET has made it more watchable than in the past, especially the later scenes that are long on dialogue. Re Louis Wolheim, does anybody really know where he taught math? I've seen him credited with teaching at Columbia U but then somebody said he was a high school teacher who taught at Columbia Prep. Regardless, his career change was extraordinary.

Was Betty Joan Perske one of the great screen icons? Maybe only when Howard Hawks was telling her how to act exactly like his wife Slim Keith; there's a bit of that other L.B., Louise Brooks, in how she was indelible under one director in particular. But she's enjoyable later on, she holds a screen record as the only woman to marry two acting Oscar winners (Jason Robards is the other one; she nearly married a third, Sinatra) and, well, she was our living link to one of our most beloved old movie legends when she passed away just short of 90 in August. For more on Lauren Bacall, Greenbriar Picture Shows said what I would have said, better.

“Sentimentality is when it doesn't come off—when it does, you get a true expression of life's sorrows.” —Alain-Fournier

Well, there we were just talking about Nancy Carroll, and I went to look for an image of her, and... how could I not? That nice Dracula still waits another year (having previously been bumped by John Bunny). You can see the full image, and others from the same shoot with her and other actresses dressed for Halloween, here.

Also, I pulled all the masthead images together into an album on my Flickr account, so you can page through all the images here, though of course you won't see the explanations and discussions that are in this thread (and for some reason the first 20 or so are still smaller than original size). Still, it's kind of cool.

“Sentimentality is when it doesn't come off—when it does, you get a true expression of life's sorrows.” —Alain-Fournier

100 years ago this month, the longest movie ever made, almost 24 hours long, started to be released. Okay, that's a highly dubious claim on Wikipedia's part, since it wasn't one feature—it was a series of films, Kalem's The Hazards of Helen. Not exactly a serial, which is what the title suggests to us now, since they weren't a continuous story; if anything it came closer to predicting TV drama, one shortish drama with recurring characters after another. In any case, this series of one-reel railroad action dramas with a female protagonist who combined, economically, both damsel in distress and her own rescuer, would with other examples of its subgenre prove to be one of those cases where movies changed society, by encouraging women to think of themselves in much more active and adventuresome terms than you expect from the Edwardian era.

The original Helen, seen here, was Helen Holmes, who would star in most of the first 26 episodes under the direction of serial specialist J.P. McGowan (whom she would marry), as well as writing and co-directing some of them herself; she had a couple of replacements until Hoot Gibson's wife Rose, renamed Helen, pulled a Roger Moore by being Helen more times than the original. Holmes' career as an action queen continued through the mid-20s; she later went back to the stage, and also married a dog trainer for the movies, passing away in 1950. The image of Helen dangling over the tracks is from episode 13 (at 9:12 below), The Escape on the Fast Freight, which is on Treasures of American Film vol. 3.

“Sentimentality is when it doesn't come off—when it does, you get a true expression of life's sorrows.” —Alain-Fournier

The Hazards of Helen wasn't the first Kalem movie that had the damsel in distress rescuing herself. Although there isn't a lot of Kalem surviving (too much, if you include Ham & Bud), the Action Girl showed up as earlier as Gene Gauntier's "Girl Spy" shorts and the "Take Care of Herself" attitude can be seen in action in Walk -- You Walk, currently on view at the National Film Preservation site. It handles the issue in a very mildly humorous fashion.

Bob

Last edited by boblipton on Sat Nov 01, 2014 7:58 am, edited 1 time in total.

The matter is complicated, and I shall proceed to complicate it still more.